Proprietary URLs?

September 15, 2000 8:51 AM

Proprietary URLs? How many of these non-standard prefixes does your system support?

Just off the top of my head with the programs I have running right now, I can handle nap: aim: hotline: and a few others, not counting all the ones built into my browser.

More inside...
posted by anildash (2 comments total)

Was trying to find documentation for Napster's protocol when I thought about all the weird extensions that applications have added to our systems.

Napster uses nap:search?artist=artname&title=Word+Word+Word. Obviously, just replace artname with the particular artist's name (multiple words joined with plus signs) and song title works the same way. I'm still parsing out the syntax for the rest of the variables, but those aren't really that important anyway, are they? I wish that ISDN and higher included connection speeds that were unknown.

And we all know about the AIM URL format, right? The link to me on my weblog is aim:goim?screenname=anildash&message=Yo! How long until MSN Messenger starts grabbing the aim: prefix? And does anyone know if the IMUnited standard specifies an im: prefix?

Seems like there oughtta be a standard for IM's and P2P clients, etc.

posted by anildash at 8:55 AM on September 15, 2000

Most of this stuff is covered in depth at W3C's "Naming and Addressing: URIs, URLs, ..." site. They also have a somewhat up to date compilation of different URI schemes.
posted by tomalak at 10:05 AM on September 15, 2000